The First Two Weeks After Redundancy Matter More Than You Think

Sometimes the most useful step isn’t moving forward, it’s stepping back first.

Redundancy has a way of creating urgency, even when it’s expected. There’s often an immediate pull to do something quickly - update the CV, start applying, get back into something as soon as possible. On the surface, that makes sense. It feels proactive and it feels like the right thing to do.

But what I see time and time again is that the first couple of weeks after redundancy can quietly influence the direction people take next and most people spend that time focused on the wrong things.

The instinct is to take action. To apply for roles that are only loosely aligned, to update a CV without a clear direction, to say yes to anything that feels like momentum. It feels like progress, but often it’s just movement without much clarity behind it and that’s where people can start to feel stuck later on.

Movement isn’t the same as momentum.

Those first couple of weeks aren’t just about finding a new role, they’re also about processing what’s just happened, understanding what you want next and making sense of where you sit in the market now. Without that, everything that follows can become reactive. Applications become broader than they need to be, experience gets undersold because it’s not clearly framed and people can find themselves heading in a direction that doesn’t quite fit.

What often surprises people is that moving quickly at the start can actually make things feel harder over time. When direction isn’t fully worked out, CVs don’t quite land, applications can come across as generic, and it’s easy for confidence to take a hit when there’s little response. The natural reaction is to apply for more roles, but that often just repeats the same pattern.

When you’re not clear on your direction, it’s easy to rely on volume instead.

A more useful way to approach those first couple of weeks is to shift the focus slightly. Not away from action altogether, but toward getting a better sense of what you actually want next. That might look like taking a bit of time to reflect on your last role - what you enjoyed, where your strengths were best used and what you’d rather not carry into the next one. It might mean looking at the types of roles you’re drawn to and asking whether they genuinely align with your experience, or whether they just feel like a logical next step.

It’s also a good time to sense-check how you’re positioning yourself. If someone asked you what you do and where you’re heading next, could you answer that clearly and confidently? If not, that’s often the place to start. Because once you have a better sense of your direction, everything else starts to follow - your CV, your LinkedIn profile, the way you talk about your experience and the types of roles you pursue.

There are also some small, practical things that can make a difference early on. Reaching out to a few trusted people in your network for perspective, rather than immediately asking for opportunities. Taking a look at the market to understand where demand actually sits, rather than relying on assumptions. Giving yourself permission to pause before committing to a direction, rather than locking into the first option that appears.

Taking the time early on doesn’t slow you down. It changes the direction you move in.

There’s a tendency to treat redundancy as something that needs to be resolved quickly, but in reality, it’s a transition point. How that time is used at the beginning can have more of an impact than people expect, not because you need to get it right straight away, but because it influences the direction you move in next.

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